Vanity Fair’s Blogopticon

(Click Image Above for the Blogopticon with Clickable Links)

Vanity Fair has put together this very handy grid of some of the world’s major blogs, which are arranged by news reporting (the Y-axis) and opinion (and juicy gossip) (the X-axis). The chart has extremely useful clickable icons, which link directly to the featured sites.

There’s Just No News Today

There’s just no news today. The President was cloistered all alone in The Oval Office, so there are no news reports of any shenanigans or misbehaviors on his part. Plus, there were no terrorist attacks in either Europe or the Middle-East. And, sadly, there were no new juicy sex scandals involving government officials, ranging from senators to governors to mayors and city council members.

Private businesses simply closed their doors to all journalists yesterday, no access. Reportedly, most major corporations have agreed to institute a new nationwide rule: if any employee talks to a journalist, his or her job is in jeopardy. So, needless to say, there were no corporate whistle-blowers, neither yesterday nor today.

And, for the first time in decades, there were no news stories about celebrities. Perez Hilton didn’t post a single gossip item today, not a one. Celebrity thingees were going so slow, that it’s rumored Perez took the day off to do some whale impersonations with his bestest buddy Jason “Gummi Bear” Davis (Perez is still trying to get over the loss of his “kissy-kissy” John Mayer) ) at a Malibu beach. Lately, there have been so many unflattering articles about celebrities, ranging from the A-list to D-list celebrities, that public relations representatives would not give interviews with any of their clients yesterday or today. Now there was one celebrity report that was released yesterday, which at first looked as though it might turn out to be a good news story for today. Avant News released the findings of a large-scale, empirically-based study of the trajectory of celebrities and celebrity-hood, which reached the conclusion that in recent years there has been a remarkable rise in short-term celebrity status among citizens from all walks of life.

“For the first time, according to our projections,” Dr. K. Phillip Townsend, a statistician at Rutgers University in New Jersey (many might remember Dr. Townsend from his three-week appearance on Fox TV’s Tenured and Untamed last spring), said, “America now has more celebrities than fans.” That trend, which determined that the current celebrity-to-fan ratio (CTFR) is 52:48, is due to multiple factors, including the proliferation of venues for reality television, politics, sporting events, and tabloid news outlets, but even more to do with a substantial “lowering of the bar” that is required for the elevation of an ordinary person to celebrity status, according to Dr. Townsend.

“Fans tend to be fiercely loyal to a given celebrity for a period ranging from thirty seconds up to four days,” co-author Dr. Griffith said. “At that point, either the celebrity is deposed by a new, bigger, brighter celebrity, or the fan’s attention span is simply unable to sustain further interest. Either way, the fan moves on and the celebrity is left out in the cold.”

Hoping to wrench a real, headline-grabbing news story out of this research report, entertainment news executives and news anchors made lightning-fast searches to track down one of those “ordinary people” who had suddenly achieved celebrity status and notoriety, hoping to land a blockbuster interview about the experience of newly-found fame, celebrity-hood and notoriety. Finally, they found who they initially thought was the perfect candidate, a Mr. Rupert Ioderm.

Rupert, an unemployed temporary worker, had achieved brief celebrity status yesterday evening during his appearance on Dancing With the Unemployed Temporary Workers on The Lifestyle Television Channel. Mr. Ioderm said that he has been very painfully affected by what he calls “post-crawl depression“, referring to the euphoria that an ephemeral celebrity experiences upon seeing his or her name briefly appear in the news crawl at the bottom of the television screen, only to disappear and never appear there again.

“When I saw my name flickering by with the headline ‘Ioderm Wins Dancing With Temps Round 1, Chokes in Runoff’, I thought I’d finally found my calling,” Mr. Ioderm said. “To be famous for having had my name appear in the crawl. Life feels so empty and meaningless now. The crawl is gone. The crawl is gone away.”

So Rupert Ioderm is really old news, not News for Now, News for Today. He’s just one more example of “Just No News Today.” However, Mr. Ioderm will be appearing next month on Losers in the News and on Dancing with the Temps: A Retrospective, both of which will air on The E-Network. Now, if reporters (maybe like from Gawker or TMZ) can just manage to catch up with him quickly enough, maybe he’ll be news then. We’ll just have to wait and see.

But for now, while the bulk of our print and TV news is usually chock-full of local crimes, stupid celebrity news, just pain old silly stories, weather, sports, and consumer information (with randomly partisan narcissistic pundits giving their smarty-pants spins about government, elections and economic issues…Hello, Andrew Sullivan…), today there was absolutely nothing to report. There was just No News Today.

Ring, Ring…God Calling Paris

Back in early June, newly redeemed Paris Hilton piously whispered, “I’m not the same person I was. I used to act dumb. It was an act. I am 26 years old, and that act is no longer cute. It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me. I know now that I can make a difference, that I have the power to do that. I have been thinking that I want to do different things when I am out of here. I have become much more spiritual. God has given me this new chance.”

She said that she would like to help in the fields of breast cancer, her grandmother had breast cancer or multiple sclerosis. Her father’s mother suffers from that disease. She thought she might get toy companies to build a kind of Paris Hilton playhouse, where sick children might come (Yoo-Hoo…Oh Michael Jackson…Are you listening?) and the toy companies could donate toys.

She said that she had a person in jail whom she described as a spiritual adviser who told her, “My spirit or soul did not like the way I was being seen and that is why I was sent to jail.” But now, she said, “Godhas released me.”

At the time, Paris said that she was reading newspapers, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and books like The Secret, The Power of Now and absolutely, absolutely of course…The Bible. And finally, Paris devoutly assured the world, “I will never again have a drink and drive.”

Right. Right to all that. Yep. Sure….

Later God. It’s Drunken Elephants Now

Well, Paris’s work for the Lord didn’t last long, if at all. Hilton’s latest publicity crusade seemed to be highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Now, binge-drinking is certainly an area of considerable expertise for Paris. Activists say that Hilton’s celebrity endorsement would be sure to raise awareness of the plight of the pachyderms that get drunk on farmers’ homemade rice beer and then go on a rampage.

“The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them,” the 26-year-old socialite allegedly said in a deeply heart-felt report that was posted on World Entertainment News Network’s Web site. Since then, her comments were picked up by other Web sites and newspapers around the globe.

Last month, six wild elephants that broke into a farm in the state of Meghalaya were electrocuted after drinking the potent brew and then uprooting an electricity pole. “There would have been more casualties if the villagers hadn’t chased them away. And four elephants died in a similar way three years ago. It is just so sad,” Hilton was allegedly quoted as saying in Tokyo last week. She was in Tokyo to judge a beauty contest.

And, of course, after all of this excitement, Hilton’s publicist now denies that Paris is working to help drunken elephants. However, Paris might make a trip to Rwanda next year. Now, that would be quite a sight….

Pink Drunken Elephants

And a Little Pole Swallowing

Now, after Paris made her important whirlwind trip to Tokyo to judge a fashion show, you just can’t blame the girl for going out on the town as soon as she flew back into New York City. Sometimes, a girl’s just got to let her hair down. In this case, Paris went out for a night of Pole Dancing, or as some have described it..er..Pole Swallowing.